Digital acceleration unleashes value for global mining giant

One of the world’s leading gold producers, and among the largest mining companies globally, operates mines in Australasia and North America.

Fujitsu and the customer have worked together on numerous projects over many years to establish enterprise-class data and AI platforms, AI/ML architectures, and self-service models in critical areas. This has enabled the unlocking of value from their data and transformed the way they work. This transformation continues across the organisation by providing powerful insights via dashboards, optimising mining operations through interactive analytics and AI/ML models, and standardising group-wide reporting with common terminology and metrics. In addition to delivering world-class Data Operations services, the partnership has created value across several key business areas.

The safety of all employees is the highest priority for the customer. As part of their continuous improvement methodology they include a governance cycle to review safety controls, processes, and data, ensuring they minimise risk. To enhance the performance of this practise the customer and Fujitsu collaborated on several new innovative digital solutions, including:

The customer’s target is net zero carbon emissions by 2050. To support monitoring progress towards the goal their sustainability performance is reported annually using GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) guidelines.

Historically, the process to collate all the necessary data for the ~190 GRI Standards used in the Sustainability Report across its operational sites was achieved via spreadsheets and manual data for over 3000 data points and 150 data owners. This process was arduous, error-prone and lacked timeliness to support the business to make faster and better-informed decisions.

Fujitsu collaborated with the customer’s team to define the Sustainability Data Centre (SDC) model, enabling the automation of thousands of data points and an improved Microsoft Power Apps-based data capture solution. The data is consolidated into a newly centralised Sustainability Data Centre (SDC) on an Azure data platform. The SDC facilitates the timely collection, review, analysis, and reporting of sustainability data.

The new SDC will assist in identifying opportunities to enhance sustainability performance across the business and facilitate more expedient reporting.

Fujitsu has supported other sustainability-focused projects, including an IoT Environmental Monitoring solution that enables proactive and real-time measurement of sensor data related to air quality, noise, dust, odour, water levels, weather and vibrations. Fujitsu also supported a key Water Management solution and an AI/ML model to forecast rainfall, enabling optimised water consumption and ultimately boosting production on site.

Mine performance metrics were previously captured via Excel, which was onerous and prone to human error. A centralised enterprise common data model was built consisting of 121.6 million records, which enabled self-service reporting.

The value delivered included improved visibility and performance management for all critical planning cycles, identification of production gaps and opportunities to fill them and the ef ficient redirection of assets as required to increase utilisation and respond to breakdowns.

The importance of open-pit reporting has been clearly demonstrated at one mine, where there were over 18,000 report executions in its first year alone.

Fujitsu helped to support and productionise the operation of several strategic digital (data science algorithms and AI) solutions to optimise processes by simulating optimal operating parameters, thereby increasing throughput rate and recovery.

These solutions included Crushed Ore Bin “Soft Sensors,” or virtual sensors, which ran in parallel with actual sensors, and a data science AI/ML model to predict the level of Crushed Ore Bins when the real sensors were unreliable.

Operating multiple mines worldwide and producing a variety of metals, the company sees any method to improve cost control and reduce expenses as crucial for meeting business targets. As Fujitsu continued to shape the customer’s digital transformation, a purpose-built self-service model was introduced to support these efforts.

With pre-calculated KPIs and metrics from SAP at a daily, weekly, and monthly level of granularity, the model includes work orders, capital costs, cost centre and inventory. Having a separate single source of truth in SAP has made it easier for teams to take the required actions to optimise their budget. A maintenance cost variance dashboard was developed and implemented for use by maintenance specialists, superintendents, and managers to improve their cost management.

A Maintenance Cost & Improvement Analyst has noted the benefits of the self-service model, stating, “The team has transitioned a heavy, data-based, clunky Excel file into a streamlined, easy-to-use analytical tool that helps both Commercial and Maintenance teams review and control their costs.”